user vs. user (was: User vs Developer: Round 2 (and half-time?) (was: Re: music font)

[Graham Percival]

On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 01:50:13AM +0100, Janek Warchoł wrote:
> 
> 2012/1/23 Xavier Scheuer <address@hidden>:
> > why I never *demand*
> > developers to fix an issue, even if it is one that is really annoying
> > my ego in almost every score I typeset.
> 
> One thing comes to my mind: you are talking about bugs that annoy many
> people, and they waste a lot of your own time.  Have you considered
> organizing a collective bounty to fix that bug?

We now have a webpage for this:
http://lilypond.org/sponsoring.html

> > My main goal was to
> > attract attention to Emilio's nice project of music font with LilyPond.
> > I attracted Graham's attention on me instead.
> 
> Well, you asked for Graham's attention when you cc'd him.
> I think cc'ing him was a mistake,

Me, and a bunch of other long-time developers.  I'd have probably
ignored the email if he hadn't done this.

> > bitten by the red ants' queen!
> 
> That's not a surprise.  Graham's sensitivity is well-known, especially
> in this context.

Yes, because it annoys me when people complain at the wrong
target.

Xavier mentioned having to submit a bug report 3 times because the
emails kept on being lost/forgotten.  That is indeed a serious
problem -- but wait, that's a problem with "users", not
"developers"!  The bug squad is composed (mainly) of users.  It
needs no technical skill, no git access, nothing like that.  All
it needs is people who can use email and a web browser and are
willing to spend 20 minutes each week.

Let's take a look at the current statistics, shall we?
http://lilypond.org/~graham/maybe-missing-emails.html
[from 2011 Dec 01 to 2012 Jan 24]

Response category       Number  Percent of total
Less than 24 hours      50      68.49%
24 to 48 hours          6       8.22%
More than 48 hours      8       10.96%
Never replied           9       12.33% 

Those numbers aren't great.  Maybe Xavier could find 20 minutes
each week to help improve them?
hmm, looking at the "never replied" emails, I'd say that 3 were
not actually bug reports.  So things aren't quite as bad as those
numbers suggest.

Also, if we look at the later statistics, we see that of the 8
emails that were responded to later than 48 hours, 5 were done by
Phil Holmes (who does bug squad on Sunday), 2 were done by Ralph
Palmer, and 1 was done by Mark Klein.  If we had somebody who was
willing to seriously deal with emails that had gotten forgotten on
Wednesdays and Thursdays (i.e.  half a week away from Sunday),
then we might be able to reliably respond to missing bug reports
within 96 hours!  Of course, a 96-hour reponse rate isn't
precisely fantastic, but it's a start.


- Graham